Each day, thousands of tractor-trailer trucks travel the highways transporting cargo from one location to another. Trucking companies, who are responsible for making sure the cargo reaches its destination on time, need the ability to track the location of the tractor-trailer throughout its journey. The trucking companies need to be able to monitor when and where a trailer is hooked up (tethered) and dropped off (untethered).
Prior asset tracking systems, which have depended primarily on the electrical cable coupling (e.g., 7-pin) to determine the tethered/untethered status have been expensive, complex, and in many situations ineffective.
Other prior art tracking systems used connectors and glad hand devices that incorporated conductors along the air brake hose line as outlined in U.S. Pat. No. 5,442,810.
Prior art solutions also often rely on a 7-pin power connector (J560) to be connected in order to sense a tethered or untethered event. This results in not all tethered/untethered events being registered. For example, many times a trailer is “shunted” from one location to another within the company yard without connecting the 7-pin power connector.
What is needed, therefore, is a new and innovative approach to monitoring and reporting the status of mobile assets, such as trailers and their valuable cargo.